The Devil Made Me Do It

Obscure orders of clandestine people are always a bit curious. And so are these two stories about people that fit that description.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Benky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is
full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet

(00:27):
of Curiosities. London is one of the world's great banking cities.
There's no question there, and like so many parts of
London's history, we can trace London's banking roots back to
the Middle Ages five to be exact. But the city's

(00:49):
first bank wasn't so much founded as it was consecrated.
You see. That's when a church in London was made.
The home of monks who were already controlling the wealth
of monarchs and landowners us Europe, chartered by the Pope
in eleven nineteen. It took the order only a few
years before King Alfonso the First of Aragon had given
them a castle in his will. Maybe he liked that

(01:10):
each monk had to take a vow of poverty and
chastity before they joined the Order. Maybe he just wanted
to get a little credit with Heaven. When he set
out towards his final destination. But he wasn't the only one.
Within a few years, the monks were managing a massive
fortune around Spain, something like a third of the kingdom.
As representatives of the Church, the monks were the ones
to benefit. It didn't take long before the brotherhood owned everything,

(01:33):
from castles and mills to all the wool and wine
their lands produced. Even if the monks themselves were poor,
the order got rich, not least because any man who
joined and took the same vow of poverty had to
hand over his own belongings, and in those days there
were plenty of rich and powerful men taking the vows.
After all, this was the era of Crusades, and when

(01:56):
French and Italian armies invaded Jerusalem in ten it also
came the era of pilgrimage. By the time the monks
opened their chapel in London almost a hundred years later,
it was simply a new way station on a well
worn road for travelers from every corner of Europe on
their way to the city of Jerusalem. And that's where
the banking comes in, because one of the things that

(02:17):
hasn't changed about traveling a long distances that it's expensive,
but in those days, pain for a lot of things
meant carrying a lot of money. But if you've heard
the story of robin Hood you might see why rich
travelers didn't think lugging sacks of gold on the road
was a good idea. So they came up with a
better solution. Someone at the beginning of their journey, say

(02:38):
in London, could go to the chapel with their wealth
and leave it in the hands of the monks. In return,
the chapel would give the traveler a note of the amount.
We don't know today exactly what that kind of document
looked like, but there's no doubt it was less conspicuous
than stacks of clanking coins, and the next time the
traveler checked in with the monks, they could make a withdrawal.
Today we might take it for granted that banks worked

(03:00):
this way, and our international credit cards are a common
everyday item, but in the Middle Ages this was a revelation.
Once they started to become well known as bankers, though,
things started to get even more complicated. They were taking
deposits from merchants, yes, but even the rulers of France
decided that they should deposit all the royal wealth. With
the Order, it essentially made these monks the crown treasurers.

(03:24):
At one point the British royals followed suit, but it
was the Crown Jewels of England they deposited in the
chapel for safekeeping, and kingdoms all across Europe. The monks
became the financial middlemen between the people and the Crown,
even collecting taxes sometimes. Soon enough, these monks, sworn to poverty,
were the most sophisticated accountants around. They even got called

(03:45):
into audit the complex financial arrangements for other merchants and
wealthy nobles. If their chapel in London had become England's
first bank, the rest of their operation grew into Europe's
first financial services company. Here's the thing, though, The Order
was founded as the Poor Knights of the Temple of
Solomon at Jerusalem. That was their official name. But the

(04:07):
richer they grew, the harder it was to call them poor,
and that might be what started their bad reputation, especially
when it comes to murky and powerful international networks. So
their name the Poor Knights of the Temple came to
be defined as suspicious dealings, hoarded treasure, and vast conspiracies
as the years passed, and eventually those medieval pioneers of

(04:28):
international banking simply became known as the Knights Templar. Those
who look back on the good old days in America

(04:49):
often think of a time when kids could freely walk
the streets without care. Front doors were left unlocked at night,
there wasn't the threat of danger around every corner. In reality,
times were still problem att Nearly every decade of the
last century has seen war. During the nineteen fifties, Edgains
brutal crimes scandalized his quiet Wisconsin town. He went on

(05:09):
to inspire such fictional serial killers as leather Face and
Norman Bates. From the Great Depression to Vietnam, there wasn't
an era in history without its problems, and as the
years advanced, so did change, often at an alarming rate.
By the late nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties, the
world looked much different than it had even ten years earlier,

(05:29):
and parents were worried. Crime was on the rise. In
suburban Moms and dads were scared for their children. Many
of their fears were laid out in a nineteen eighty
book called Michelle Remembers a memoir of sorts by a
woman named Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist, Lawrence Pastor. In
the book, Smith claimed to have suffered through something called
satanic ritual abuse when she was five years old. The

(05:52):
book was eventually discredited, but not before it did some
serious damage to the national psyche. It kicked off an
era in American history and as the Satanic Panic, a
time when the media, law enforcement, and mental health industry
all started warning people about satanic cults that plagued their
small towns, and children were especially in danger. One of

(06:13):
the biggest stories of the day had to do with
a college student named James Dallas Egbert. James had grown
up in a suburb of Dayton, Ohio, and from a
young age it was clear that he was a little
bit different. For one, he was a genius, having graduated
high school at the age of sixteen. In nineteen seventy nine,
he was enrolled at Michigan State University as a computer
science major. Being young and on his own in such

(06:35):
a new place had taken a toll on him. The
experience sent him into a spiral of depression and drug use,
and he'd fallen in with a group of other students
who had gotten him into a strange new form of occultism.
They would sit around a table each night reciting incantations
summoning demons and other hellish creatures from their dorm rooms.
Egbert's parents worried about him, but it all came to

(06:57):
a head on the day that James disappeared. No but
he knew where he had gone, so the police were
called in and his parents hired a private investigator named
William Dear. The investigator noticed a clue in the boy's
dorm room wall. He followed his hunch down to the
steam tunnels beneath the university, where it was clear that
James had been, and in the process his investigation unearthed

(07:19):
a lot about the troubled students. His trip to the
steam tunnels had most likely been part of the ritual
the students were performing related to their evening summoning sessions
back in the dorms, and it was this story that
the papers and news programs reported on could a satanic
cult be living on Michigan State's campus. Not long after

(07:39):
he went missing, James eventually called William Dear and told
him where he was. He had traveled from Michigan to
New Orleans, where he planned on taking his own life.
The investigator came down immediately to collect James and return
him to his family. The truth was that James had
faced severe depression and anxiety over a number of issues
in his life, but he begged dear not to tell

(08:01):
anyone without a valid explanation for his disappearance. Though the
press only had one thing to hold onto James's nightly
rituals with his friends. The only problem was that he
actually hadn't joined a satanic cult. He had been casting
spells and slaying creatures in a fairly new tabletop game
known as Dungeons and Dragons. And because the media couldn't

(08:22):
report on the truth about James, the theories and fears
about Dungeons and Dragons spread among concerned parents everywhere. Nowadays,
the game is played every day by kids, teens, and
even Hollywood celebrities. It's become a part of everyday culture.
But back then, Dungeons and Dragons was seen as a
menace and a gateway to the dark side. More than

(08:44):
just a game, it was viewed by many as a
roll of the dice for America's soul. Little did they
know it would be a critical hit